CreativeWire

Wednesday

Fungi, those exotic "creatures" with which we have a love and hate relationship, may seem primitive to most people, but the truth is that they have one of the most uncanny mating systems out there. In order to digest this post as smoothly as possible, a disclaimer is a must. You need to give all your prior knowledge pertaining to gender a rest, because what you are about to witness defy all kinds of conventional conceptions about mating. With that warning out of way, we can now finally talk about sex among fungi.

Saturday

When we try to picture what an alien living on Kepler-452b might look like, the first image that comes to our mind is that of a greenish creature with shiny big eyes and a giant brain. However, this impression is about to change as a new scientific study from the University of Oxford has shown that aliens might in fact be more similar to us than we think.

Tuesday

While the Kepler space telescope's data collecting ability was severely handicapped by the failure of two of its four reaction wheels on July 14 2012 and May 11 2013 respectively, it has certainly revolutionized the search for exoplanets with its discovery of more than 2300 confirmed exoplanets and another 4,496 unconfirmed alien worlds.

A new analysis of Kepler's data collected in its first few operational years preceding the wheel accident, has revealed the existence of 20 potential exoplanets that may actually be able to harbor alien life.

Monday

Fish getting emotional and fruit flies having primitive internal emotions? If this isn't enough to give you a braingasm, then how about bacteria that possess a sense of touch? Yes, you are not reading a science fiction book, because a research team led by Prof. Urs Jenal at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, has discovered that bacteria are actually capable of sensing their environment!

Sunday

"The things we do for science" might be the standard Jaime Lannister-like response one would get upon asking the team members behind this research about their unconventional approach to studying dolphin sex.
Researchers at Dalhousie, Massachusetts and Tufts Universities have used an artificially erected dead dolphin penis (i.e., an artificial dead boner so to speak) to understand how these cetaceans mate in the wild.

Saturday

We all were exposed to a situation where our excuses for not showing up for a party or a meeting seemed fishy to the others. Although the term "fishy" bears a negative meaning in most cases since it likely originated from the fact that fish are slippery and smell bad after a while, things might change after a recent scientific study showed that fish get in fact emotional, just like humans do. Well, sort of!

Thursday

Molecular robots that build and assemble molecules? Check. Micro-robots that are capable of flying, swimming, diving and breaking out of water? Check. As science and technology continue to delve into the "Nanoland" realm, it stands to reason that the micro-machine tendency will only keep solidifying as more and more scientific researches try to explore the micro-world.
In what appears to be a natural consequence of this trend, a team of scientists from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically-Inspired Engineering at Harvard, managed to create a RoboBee that is capable of flying, swimming, and flying again after diving out of water.